Giant Box of Comics

Also

"I began scooping the bees"

Protective bee wear is a super helpful tool, especially when harvesting honey, but not always necessary. If I'm just doing a routine inspection I typically just wear a net hat. Sometimes I forgo that entirely if I'm just doing a quick peek, but no matter what, I never wear gloves. Honey bees are super chill and easy going if handled properly (and I've found they get to know you so to speak, and settle down even more as time goes on) and I feel the less clunky a suit I'm wearing, the better. Especially on my hands. See, bees release a stress hormone that can get everyone in a tizzy if they're hurt. So squishing one during inspection by accident isn't a good thing. Without gloves, I'm able to feel if a honey been gets beneath my finger and move my grip before hurting it. Plus it makes it far easier to maneuver the frames which in turn gives me a quicker inspection and less stress for the ladies.

With these bees, I'm guessing they were very close to a swarm state. That's when the hive runs out of room and are getting ready to split. Bees in this state hardly ever sting and are generally very easy going as they're focused on getting ready to have part of, or all, the hive move out.

(When you see those pictures of a bunch of bees hanging out somewhere without a hive, that's a swarm. They're usually entirely harmless and are just chilling until they find a new place to live.)

I'm thinking that's also why they were so ready to move into the hive she provided. It's more spacious and is essentially everything they want for a new home since they outgrew their floorboard house.

Even if these bees weren't near that state, the use of the smoker, the slow and steady way she's moving, and the way she naturally encouraged (by placing the queen inside the new hive) them to transfer themselves into the provided hive makes her likeliness of getting stung pretty slim.

Apologies for this getting long. 😅

Welcome to another installment of Failed-Project Friday, now on tumblr! Circa 1997, I was in the midst of my first work for Wildstorm, writing and drawing the three-issue “Grunge! The Movie” arc on the kinda-sorta anthology series Gen13: Bootleg. (Yes, folks, at one time Gen13 was so popular that it boasted a separate title for other creators to write and draw stories of Fairchild and friends.) At the same time, I was flailing desperately about to line up a crossover—any crossover—between my version of the Dirty Pair and some other, more popular book, in an attempt to boost the DP’s profile and earn some sweet mainstream page rates in the process. As I was working on both books at the time, a Gen13/ Dirty Pair crossover seemed like an obvious idea to pitch…  So I dusted off the antagonists and premise from yet another defunct project, a 1993-ish Marvel miniseries proposal titled “X-Force: Junk Mail.” This old concept involved nanotech salesman from the far future traveling back in time to conduct a wildly bizarre and incredibly violent infomercial/ sales pitch on X-Force’s hapless mutants. (If I ever dig up the art from that proposal, I’ll post that here.) Suffice it to say that, in this variation on the idea, Kei and Yuri also go back in time and team up with three of Gen13’s members to battle an ultra-tech enemy whose “infomercial” soon spirals completely out of control. (Once again, poor Sarah and Bobby got shafted out of an appearance, as I didn’t want a seven-member set of protagonists; the DP’s rarely appearing feline companion Mughi was likewise omitted.) Well, not surprisingly, the pitch received no interest from Wildstorm, and that was the end of that crossover proposal. Turned out this would be one of many, many failed attempts on my part to get a Dirty Pair crossover off the ground… Dirty Pair/ Superman, Dirty Pair/ Predator, Dirty Pair/ Aliens (just kidding, that would’ve been too much like the DP Project Eden movie), even Dirty Pair/ Buffy the Vampire Slayer (okay, I never even formally proposed that one). Oh, well.